“Climate change affects everything that you do,” said report co-author Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina. “It affects where you live, where you work and where you play and the infrastructure that you need to do all these things. It’s more than just the polar bears.”

I had contemplated writing about this myself, but you can only laugh at alarmists so often. After a while it gets boring and a bit irritating.

David states, “Frankly, I can’t think of a single instance in my entire lifetime where I considered climate change in any of my decisions about anything. Anything.”

He goes on to discuss some of the weather he’s experienced in various places in the US. He’ spot on in that regard. What the alarmist nutters are calling extremes is simply weather which has been experienced here for thousands of years. He accurately states that Climate Change simply isn’t a problem here.

But, David is a warmist, so he can’t help throwing in some strange talking points. One of them I’d like to point out, not because I want to try to cast David in a bad light or anything, but to simply make an observation and generate thought and discussion. Here’s what David wrote which piqued my interest……

If you’re not a well-to-do American, a relatively impoverished person living near the equator in a developing country, climate change can already be a problem. And it’s going to be a problem for everyone if CO2 emissions keep increasing exponentially, as they are.

Like I said, he’s a warmist so he can’t help but to write some silly utterance such as that.

Back when the alarmism was still Global Warming, the alarmists used to have all sorts of fanciful equations regarding energy budgets and they tied them to our global temperatures. There’s plenty of reasons to mock this sophistry, but, it’s part of the literature.

For years, many skeptics have pointed out the energy required to raise the temperature of any given object is dependent upon the starting temperature. Relatively very little energy is needed to raise the temperature of something 10 degrees if the starting temperature is minus 90 C compared to raising it 10 degrees if the starting temp is 90 C.

Now, these energy budget calculations have all but been abandoned because the earth’s temps haven’t been raising.

As noted many times, I’m a bit lazy. And, back of the envelope calculations always seem to have a flaw or two in them or they over generalize. So, I’ll leave it to more capable readers. But, this takes me back to David’s statement about people living around the equator. Let’s look at what the temps are telling us for that location…….

Yes, the start point is cherry-picked. But, the question remains, how much additional energy was required to for us to see this? I’m going to take a stab at it….. uhmm none? How’s that possible if we’re to believe the “well mixed atmospheric CO2” proclamation? Well, it isn’t. Given the recent revelations about Alaska’s temps and the Antarctic’s, we have to say there’s much to question and perhaps revisit about the energy calculations and budgets.

The Foster and Rahmstorf line of thought can be easily ignored. The reason why I’m posting this is that it goes to the foundation of the Global Warming premise. Strip away all of the blathering about “extreme weather events” and volcanoes and ENSO and the like because this isn’t what drives the alleged science. What drives it is the thought about energy retention of the so-called Green House Gases. This is the money shot. All of that energy retention is raising the earth’s temp, except when it doesn’t.

You have two posts: one covering Mauna Loa and another the ENSO. A few years back I tied them together. I was arguing with a warmists about the Mauna Loa CO2 graph nonsense. So I took the Mauna Loa data, ran a 12-month running average, and compared it to the SOI. It was a small fluctuation, but it matched the SOI nearly exactly. I didn’t hear from him about Mauna Loa again. :-)

I sent this to David but his site is hard to get a comment on.
David.
It is so refreshing to read a level headed posting instead of the constant barrage of doom and gloom commentators such as Susan Cutter. It has become a constant irritating drone like the buzz of a mosquito. People like myself have tuned out the scary story’s, its old and over done, they are now preaching to the ever shrinking choir. The promoters of global warming/climate change have oversold, over hype and under delivered the evidence. And the fact the worlds economy is at best spluttering along does not help the constant demand for redistribution or Co2 taxes de-industrialize or validate expensive Co2 producing climate conferences/party’s.

Another point you failed to make, concerns WHERE the affects will be felt first. According to prevailing AGW theory, the mid latitudes and even the polar caps will see the biggest effect, with the equator being relatively untouched. So how does that fit into his meme?

a relatively impoverished person living near the equator in a developing country, climate change can already be a problem

Perhaps he means the Climate Change(TM) industry, which has led to ethanol and biodiesel mandates eating up maize and palm oil for vehicles, locking up arable land and dispossessing impoverished people for Big Green to grow REDD trees on their land, and raising food prices so high that poor people can’t get enough to eat.

Speaking of David, he was the one that got me statistically testing the differences in the US records between NOAA and RSS/UAH. Now that 2012 is over, I need to revisit that using yearly averages (which gets rid of much of the autocorrelation) to see if the NOAA positive bias is significant at 2- and 3- sigma values. Considering there was a positive bias relative to RSS at the ~5 sigma level using the monthly data after adjusting for tropospheric amplification, I’m guessing the yearly data will still be highly significant. Once I do the analysis, I’m still hoping on writing it up for a guest post for you. It’s just been really busy for me lately…wife was sick last weekend, work’s been busy, and we’re also in the process of getting ready to sell our house.

I don’t have time to post in detail about this, but you should be able to get most of the relevant discussion by looking at my original comment on the topic as well as any of the earlier comments on that same thread:

Basically, David made the same argument that I’ve seen CAGWers make over and over again – that the surface data is sound and proof of its quality is that surface data for the US cannot be stated to be significantly higher than the RSS or UAH data for the US over the same time period. I jumped in and did the same thing that I’ve started doing over and over again when I see a CAGWer make this claim, which was to point out that the RSS/UAH data are lower troposphere (LT) and therefore SHOULD BE HIGHER in trend than the surface data even though they’re lower (even if not significantly). I went a step farther that time and showed that, after adjusting for the altitude distance, the positive bias in the surface data was signficant at roughly the 2sigma level before accounting for any autocorrelation. (And to answer your question, I don’t know/care what this bias is from…UHI, micrositing, adjustments…doesn’t matter.) David rightfully countered that my amplification factor might be wrong (I used 1.4 and it’s likely closer to 1.2), which left me scratching my head a bit. Well, later that day I went to the track to put in a tempo run, and that extra blood to my brain helped me realize that the approach David (and all the other CAGWers I’ve seen make the same assertion) was using was in fact wrong. He was looking at the difference in the trends in the data set instead of the trends of the differences. Because the trends are subjected to all sorts of noise (ENSO, volcanoes, etc) that aren’t representative of the adjustments, UHI, and other biases, then the statistical significance is unfairly reduced. With my chemistry background, the best way I can think to describe it is a kinetic experiment with a UV/vis absorbance spectrometer that uses a reference cell. No one goes and get the individual data for both the sample and reference cell, draws trends for those data, and then calculates significance from the difference in trends. Doing so would be silly–the point of the reference cell is to be able to subtract out noise that effects both cells equally…thus everyone plotting trends is plotting the TREND OF THE DIFFERENCE between the two cells. For those not chemistry inclined, this is basically the same thing climate people do when they plot anomalies.

So, looking at it the right way, I found a ~3-sigma positive bias in NOAA’s US surface data vs UAH and ~5-sigma (!) bias vs RSS.

Now, I want to make my analysis more robust before writing a guest post on it here. Naturally, part of that means a more detailed explanation with examples and plots. But also I want to make sure to get the right LT amplification factor for the US (I assumed 1.2). I also want to try to minimize autocorrelation. Averaging the data into yearly averages helps to reduce autocorrelation dramatically, so I was waiting until all the 2012 data was in.

Anyway, I ended up rambling way too long. Hank, if you want to, I’d love it if you’d look at my analysis and find ways to make it better or things that are wrong with it. Right now, except for the assumed LT amplification factor and no adjustment for autocorrelation, I don’t see anything wrong with it, and it’s very strong evidence that the surface data is biased.

By the way, you’re showing the RSS data for the tropics. While at the surface the warming trend for the tropics is supposed to be the lowest (which makes me really confused by David’s comment), in the troposphere, the tropics are expected to have the highest amplification relative to the surface trend. IIRC, at the tropics, the amplification factor is supposed to be ~1.5x. The larger amplification factor should help to offset the lower surface trend, so the satellite data should show considerably lower differences in warming trend for different latitudes than the surface data.

“While at the surface the warming trend for the tropics is supposed to be the lowest (which makes me really confused by David’s comment), in the troposphere, the tropics are expected to have the highest amplification relative to the surface trend.”

Yeh, it was some low hanging fruit David offered. ;)

I’m really looking forward to your write up! Sick wives are no fun. No worries, I’ve plenty to write about in the meantime.